"I'd like to have a talk with him, certainly," responded the detective, with some eagerness. "I know a bit about these chaps—some of them can see through a brick wall!"
Lorrimore turned to Mr. Raven.
"If your coachman could run across with the dog-cart, or anything handy," he said, "and would tell Wing that I want him, here, he'd be with me at once. And he may be able to suggest something—I know that before he came to me—I picked him up in Bombay—he had knocked about the ports of Southern China a great deal."
"Come with me and give my coachman instructions," said Mr. Raven. "He'll run over to your place in ten minutes; and while we are discussing this affair we may as well have as much light as we can get on it."
He and Lorrimore left the room together; when they returned, the conversation reverted to a discussion of possible ways and means of finding out more about the antecedents of the Quicks. Half an hour passed in this—fruitlessly; then the door was quietly opened and behind the somewhat pompous figure of the butler I saw the bland, obsequious smile of the Chinaman.
CHAPTER XI
THE FIVE CONCLUSIONS
We who sat round that table during the next hour or so must have made a strange group. Mr. Raven, always a little nervous and flustered in manner; his niece, fresh and eager, in her pretty dinner dress, a curious contrast to the antiquated garb and parchment face of old Cazalette, who sat by her, watchful and doubting; the officialdom-suggesting figure of the police-inspector, erect and rigid in his close-fitting uniform; the detective, rubicund and confident, though of what one scarcely knew; Lorrimore and myself, keen listeners and watchers, and last, but not by any means the least notable, the bland, suave Chinaman in his neat native dress, sitting modestly in the background, inscrutable as an image carved out of ivory. I do not know what the rest thought, but it lay in my own mind that if there was one man in that room who might be trusted to find his way out of the maze in which we were wandering, that man was Dr. Lorrimore's servant.